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Proposed Shell Reballance Supertest

From words—to deeds!

Today we’re starting work on one of the hottest and the most discussed issues among those mentioned at WG Fest 2018: the overall 25–30% drop in damage for special rounds. We want to make the shell choice more thoughtful in every battle situation and lower the damage special rounds deal (especially against well-armored spots).

It should be noted: this is the very first testing iteration aimed at general evaluation of our hypothesis described above. For now, it’s merely a rebalance of special shells’ damage, without any adjustments to their cost.

We’ll conduct the Supertest with a limited selection of vehicles (a bit more than 30) to check:

The viability of the idea and the impact of its implementation on the game;

The effect of lowering the special shells’ damage has on the total damage dealt;

The overall combat efficiency of the vehicles involved in testing.

The decision to decrease special rounds’ damage isn’t set in stone as it’s still in development, so it may change significantly. After the first testing run, we’ll decide what to do next: we may change the amount of damage we slash off the special rounds, fine-tune the stats of individual vehicles, or enlarge the pool of tanks in the Supertest to gather even more data.

Of course, we’ll take into consideration your feedback on the proposed changes.

We intentionally selected very different vehicles for the testing pool—for the most efficient tracking of the impact the rebalance will have on battle stats. For some vehicles having APCRs as their basic rounds, we substituted these with AP shots of the same speed. Likewise, for the vehicles with AP rounds as their specials, we replaced these with APCRs. We’ll track the distribution of damage done per shell type, the changes in vehicles’ battle stats with regard to their class and role, and lots of other parameters.

Damage Changes

Vehicle

Gun

Old Damage

New Damage

IS-3

122mm BL-9

390

290

T-44

100mm LB-1

250

190

IS-7

130mm S-70

490

360

KV-5

107mm ZiS-6M

300

225

KV-2

152mm M-10

700

500

Object 268

152mm M64

750

530

IS-4

122mm M62-T2

440

320

T100LT

100mm T 100

300

225

Obj. 430U

122mm M62-T2

440

320

Tiger II

105mm KwK46-L68

320

240

Ferdinand

128mm 44-L55

490

360

Maus

128mm Kw.K 44 L/55

490

360

Jagdtiger

128mm PaK 44 L/66

560

410

E-100

150mm Kw.K 44 L/38

750

530

Panther II

88mm Kw.K L/100

240

180

JagdPz E100

180mm PaK K/72

1050

735

Leopard 1

105mm L7A3

390

290

Pershing

90mm T15E2M2

240

180

T57 Heavy

120mm T179

400

300

T110E4

155mm T7E2

750

530

T110E3

155mm T7E2

750

530

T69

90mm T178

240

180

T49

152mm M81

700

500

M48A5 Patton

105mm M68

390

290

AMX 13 90

90mm F3M

240

180

Bat.Chatillon 25t

105mm mle. 57

390

290

AMX AC Mle1948

120mm AC SA46

400

300

Tortoise

120mm AT L1A1

400

300

Super Conqueror

120mm L1A1

400

300

Badger

123mm OQF Mk. 1

480

350

TVP T50/51

10mm AK1

320

240

Progetto M40/65

Cannone 105/51 M68

360

270

WZ111 1G FT

130mm 59-130JG FT

560

410

Type 5 Heavy

150mm/45 41st year

1400

750

A few questions we hope to get answers for after the test

How much shall the special rounds’ damage (especially against well-armored targets) drop? This is one of the key areas the players on heavily armored vehicles asked us to address.

How shall the damage be re-distributed between the two other shell types? Our aim is to reduce the special rounds damage (against well-armored targets in particular). Thus the overall damage of other shell types could grow; we want to check whether it’s true during the test. We’ll monitor these parameters and modify them if needed.

How shall the share of HE shell damage change? Currently, the total share of HE damage is small, and we don’t intend to change it. Overall, the combined special HE shell damage is mostly dealt by the Type 4 Heavy and the Type 5 Heavy tanks (we adjusted some stats of both of these for the test). The special round for the Type 5 Heavy will be substituted with a HESH with an alpha of 750 points and a penetration of 193 mm. During the tests, we’ll thoroughly monitor the changes in HE shells usage after the special rounds rebalance.

How shall the rebalance affect the battle performance of individual vehicles? We know that currently certain tanks are played with a greater-than-average special to non-special rounds ratio, to increase their efficiency. So we want to assess how these vehicles’ performance changes.

The test is just starting, and your feedback will help us make correct decisions. Let us know what you think, and we’ll consider it while working on the adjustments for the next iteration.

I don’t know why the HEAT is being nerfed on it either… it’s not even the “premium” round, and it’s very situational – HE is likely to pen vs paper targets like lights – pretty much the only time I fire it is the sides of E75s… it’s not even got enough pen to pen the rear of the tank…

Too late, but even if I was still in the game I’d leave over this trash. It seems that they’ve forgotten about how hard it is to pen with crappy standard rounds. This’ll only cause people to use more premium rounds…oh that’s right, they requested that they’re no longer referred to as such b/c they don’t have a premium currency attached anymore. Granted they still will cost a decent amount of silver that’ll make u think it’s a premium. But anyway, the more of the premium rounds used, the less players earn, and the game will lose even more people. B/c why ask ALL the players what they want when they could just ask the Russian player base. B/c we all know the Russian player base has given WG so many great ideas. In the end this’ll probably turn into another rubicon. Screw WG. I’ll stick with destiny for now.

they want to change…. ok… but i have concerns and not from using the “special” GOLD ammo, is that those tanks who need it specially light tanks will have noticeble dificult from a already impossible job from penetrating a heavy 2 tier higher tanks from the front, so whit the current not changing any time soon crap match making system currentlyu in the game, they are going back into rendering light tanks USSELESS AGAIN

The hull cheeks on the Type 5 aren’t weaker than the front of the hull, so if he angles enough so they are flat and “only” 270 effective you’re better off shooting the side. The driver hatch and commander hatch are both about 250mm effective armor, that give the IS-7 a 50% chance of penning with AP. While taking 400-600 damage in return. If you get lucky you will do 1500 damage before dying. If the type angles and moves you might do 1 shot of damage.

1) These parts are 150mm and 160mm thick, respectfully, not 100mm.
2) The coincidence rangefinders on the Type 4 and Type 5 are NOT part of the hit boxes of the vehicles, just like the ragefinder on the T29.

Now, using a gun with 250mm of penetration against unangled Type 4 and Type 5 heavies results in no better than a 62% chance to penetrate the Type 4, and no better than a 52% chance to penetrate the Type 5 (dead front center on the cupola). This is assuming you know exactly where to aim, and can actually hit what you’re aiming at.

If you ignore the rather difficult shot on the cupola, then there’s only a 46% chance of penetrating the frontal “weak spots” of a Type 5 with 250mm of penetration. (Gunner’s hatch)

If the person playing the tank is halfway competent and angles his armor, the chance to penetrate drops to 52% for the Type 4, and – get this – a whopping 24% chance to penetrate the weak spots of the Type 5 (again ignoring the “perfect” hit on the commander’s hatch which the global accuracy nerfs have made rather difficult to accomplish).

Yes, these tanks have “weak spots” that can technically be penetrated by tier 10 tanks. But if the player driving the Type 5 is any good, you’re probably not going to be penetrating even his weak spots.

Yeah, it would be really funny to watch WG saying to paying subskilled players “learn to aim”.
To watch WoT insta loosing another bunch of players, because universal skill increaser called Gold Ammo became not so universal.

Aiming has nothing to economy.
If (when) price to inflict damage is higher than reward for inflicted damage, it’s a money grab.

Along with money grab, it will be also free exp grab (so money grab^2) since there are tanks balanced to be gold spammers. Gold nerf means auto nerf for these tanks, so higher pressure to burn free exp and go further.

The only tanks that will benefit from this idea are standard gold magnets. They will survive one or two hist more.

I don’t know why the HEAT is being nerfed on it either… it’s not even the “premium” round, and it’s very situational – HE is likely to pen vs paper targets like lights – pretty much the only time I fire it is the sides of E75s… it’s not even got enough pen to pen the rear of the tank…

I know the meme is only HE but only the people which dont know the tank load only HE
The really good drivers fire Premium Ap since you can actually pen your target and do 700 damage instead of 300 outtrading tier 7 tanks is the norm
i do shoot HE but the accuary nerf and weakspot removal dont let you pen your targets most of the time even if fully aimed

All i want is for them to increase the Pen of the premium Round if they change it to apcr or heat since both of these ammo types usually have more pen as they perform worse against angled armor

Am i the only one that think “special” ammo is the least problem in this game?First fix broken mm,broken arty mechanics,stun shit,broken corridor maps,bad pixeling in almost every map,broken tanks overpowered in their tier,idiot RNG at 25% and than u can talk about special anmmo.I dont have problems when enemy shooting gold at me,but have problem with all that stuff mention above.

No the gold ammo is one of the biggest problems BECAUSE it covers the 25% RNG issue.
I’d go as far to say that 99.9% of the tanks in the game can pen tanks of their tier and at least 1 tier higher regardless of gun if the RNG was tightened.

I used to drive the E-100 pre buff (post buff the climate became too hard on the E-100) and used AP on the 15cm almost exclusively only switching to HE on almost dead tanks, did carry some gold spammo but didn’t use it.
Anyway the main point of bringing this up is that I could very easily tell when RNG was letting the tank’s gun work (you’d make loads of damage and therefor LODS EMONE since the ammo is very cheap for what it does) and when it wasn’t (6 shots fired 5 bounces and the pen was a track) the old 15cm AP had 235mm of pen which is plenty for any tank you’d see, the problem was when it’d low roll 170 pen or something and bounce off a plate it has no business bouncing off of.

Now tell me what do most people say in regards to bouncing shots your gun shouldn’t bounce currently?
“Hurr just load duh GOLD spammo!”
Not,
“WG needs to tighten up RNG/rework pen mechanics.”
THAT is why gold spammo is a problem that needs to be dealt with first and THEN work on RNG.

If wg want to do a fair and good job they should do the price for all shells the same and cut the dmg for special ammo to half. Then i would like to see if obj 140 will spam heat in grille 15 for 150 hp dmg….

Gold ammo “fix” it,s very urgent because they want people to buy moore silver packs with real money…they want us to pay moore or to play moore( in order to gether moore silver in low tiers to support a game in tier 10) in order to play in tier 10.

It going to be beautifull expirience playing with my AMX1357,shooting gold and making 40 damage per shot in tier 9 tanks,or i just could shoot regular ammo and dont pen anything.Thank you WG,i play mostly light tanks,so i guess it is game over for me if this thing going on live server.

This could actually save WoT for me.
Bad players who always shoot premium ammo because they are too stupid to learn dealing less damage per shot? Yes please, I take it!
I can still deal full damage to those gold noobs with my standard rounds! As always, but they will deal less damage in return. Good change!

I like your thinking and agree with you! Hope they will reduce even more dmg after test or increase reload time for special ammo 😉
And plus to that should be: if you using special ammo then your skill’s statistics will be gained slower 😉

Good thing WG u included that OP beasts Panther2 and Perhing,they gonna blast enemies after this,cant wait to humiliate defenders,type4,5 with that blasting damage of 180 per shot.Theay gonna cry for at least 3 or 4 mins while i killing them.They deserve it.
Thank you WG,u really know what is important in this game,every step u doing is better than previous.This game soon will be the best game in the world with this smart decisions.And please WG,can u buff IS3A rounds to 590 per shot,it have reverse mechanics in loading,and now u could put reverse mechanic in damage also,its gonna be smart too.U are the best WG,must be the smartest people ever lived,i really envy you.

Any change is going to piss the community.
Thing is, those changes should be good or in case theyre bad changed fast.
As for wg… FIRE THE STATS DEPARTMENT, IF YOU TAKE 6 MONTHS TO FIX A F***** OP TANK, YOU ARE NOT NEEDED.

Bad idea WG — If you want people to fire fewer “special” shells, just raise the cost of the shell to make it a less attractive option or limit the number of “special” across the board to (pick a number) say, 25% of the loadout.

Personally, I think it’s fine as is. I don’t care if people spam prammo at me. I expect it and don’t consider it an unfair advantage – after all, I can spam it right back at them If I choose. If a tank already struggles to pen a higher tier opponent even with “special”, then reducing damage dealt could very well encourage firing even more “special”.

What you have here WG is a power creep, armor, MM issue of your own making – NOT a shell design issue.

It will make actual better players better because noobs wont be able to spam premium ammo(or if they do I just kill them with normal rounds) because they do not know how to aim properly. I want to be better so I just spam premium ammo to get my win8 higher(this could eliminate that problem). Now if they could just get rid of the aimbot mods.

The issue has been the premium ammo right from the beginning. The reason WG did not want to just get rid of it was because of the economy. When the game used to have weakspots you could still pen just about anything with normal ammo. But you needed to aim, you needed to be skilled enough to hide your weakspots while luring out your enemies’ weakspots to shoot at.

And in those scenarios premium ammo was used to make an effortless pen, which, in randoms, resulted in the term “gold noob”. As you might be aware.

You see, the mechanic for just simply nullifying armor with paying more was there way before powercreep armor of today. In a game whose skill mechanic used to be based on knowing how to use objects, terrain and other tanks to hide your weakspots as well as knowing how to angle your armor effectively – it is absolutely mind boggling how and why someone would come up with an ammo type (premium ammo) that completely erases armor usage mechanics from the game.

How on earth would that *ever* make the game a better one? Well, it never did.

Here’s somewhat of a list of things that happened:
1) At one point in history, WG realized heavies were an underdog because armor could be penetrated by everyone and everywhere. By shooting gold. Yet they denied that gold ammo was the culprit.
2) General accuracy nerfs were introduced – talking about the general dispersion nerfs here. For not to be able to hit the weakspots and thusly making “armor relevant again”.
3) To keep 330 penning meds and 500m spotrange invisible TDs away from heavies, they created corridor maps. This did not work – TDs just camped at the end of said corridors.
4) Because now TDs were the problem, they nerfed their class bonus – camo ratings after firing. They also nerfed their view ranges so they could not spot for themselves. Now they could be seen shooting from the end of the corridors and they could not spot for themselves.
5) So now the heavies were still bombarded and outperformed by meds and arty. What they did was numerous arty nerfs, the latest of being what we see in the game now.
6) For the problem of the mediums: They are versatile tanks and could not be nerfed that well as a whole class, nor more with map design principles. So what did they do then? Buff the armor altogether and just about completely remove weakspots.
7) During this darkish time of denial and “making armor great again” they also released a couple of OP premium heavies “now that the heavies are kings of the game”. Defender, Chrysler K, etc. Ones that could never be touched after introduction.
8) So now they admit gold ammo is a problem, but they refuse to introduce weakspots again. Why? Well, my fair guess is: they’ve dug themselves in a whole that they simply can’t fix. Introducing weakspots to the game would make the OP premium heavies even more game breaking because they can’t change them to have ones.

Would it not be wonderful to have a game that actually gives real ammunition choices based on skill of choosing the correct shell type for the correct situation? Not a “pay more to absolutely nullify the enemy’s defense” type of a “choice”? Premium ammo nerf without re-introducing weakspots will not do any good. The answer always was also to have both: Nerf premium ammo AND introduce weakspots.

The problem here is a lot of the community seems to acknowledge this, but WG is, once again, in denial.

All this is doing is buffing heavy armor tanks a LOT Type 4 and 5, obj 430u, 268v4, t110e3, is4 and 7 , we 5a e.t.c. e.t.c. good luck being 2 tiers down and not being able to pen AP in meds and lights and having garbage gold rounds.

just messing up the balance more and creating a giant credit sink so people need prem account more and more boosters to fight heavy armor in corridor maps
Good job f’ing the game up even more badly

Not to mention maus, vk series, badger, all Russian ht, all massively buffed.

Next I think wg should make all corridors even more narrow so only 1 tank can go through at a time and put large bushes at each end for op tds and away to camp.. oh wait.. this had been done already. My bad

Has anyone considered something like overpenetration like in Armored Warfare? I found it a pretty nice mechanic. Makes you actually need to know what to load for a certain target. Also limit the ammo types to two per tank. You can pick 2 types of the following:
AP – mediocre velocity, damage and penetration, low cost, but loses pen. at distance
APCR – high velocity and pen., low damage, higher cost also loses pen. at distance
HEAT – equal damage to AP, slightly more pen, but less velocity and much higher cost. doesn’t lose pen. at distance
HE – low velocity, pen, cost but high damage, obviously no pen. loss
HESH – low velocity, higher pen and also higher cost, also no pen. loss over distance.

then balance out certain tanks, by limiting the different shell types.

Also maybe distinguish pen and damage values not by gun, rather by tank and tier, but that’s more of a hasty thought.

If they also reduce the price of gold shells to be similar to standard shells, then this is a fair compromise. Two different shell types for two different purposes.

The problem is that right now we’re in a lose-lose situation, you see a Type 5 and load gold because your standard shells are somewhere between unreliable and useless. If you have the gold, you’d be crazy not to use it. Price alone is the only reason not to. But on the other side the Type 5 is barraged by gold and if that tactic works then all of his investment into armor is wasted.

And the way out of that lose-lose situation is not to rely on idiot-proof armor in the first place. Durability can be modeled in other ways, hit points for instance. And even armor that has obvious weakspots can still serve a purpose. If you’re encouraged to aim for a weakspot rather than center mass, then the armor has done its job.

If armor values are balanced around standard shells, then they can be modest and still functional. And if armor values are modest, players won’t be encouraged to spam gold at it. If they aren’t encouraged to spam gold at it, they the armor doesn’t need to be balanced around gold spam.

The vice-versa also applies. Balance armor around gold spam, and gold spam only becomes more common, and when gold spam is common, only extreme armor values counter it.

Very good change WG. Been a long time coming!! Please also nerf meds like you did on blitz that they can’t easily pen you from the front. Nothing is more annoying with h a medium sitting in front shooting gold at a superheavy and getting away with it. They are mediums they should be able to flank and penerate from the sides not from the front!

You’re assuming that the option to flank is practical in the current map and team positioning. Often it isn’t. The current meta bends over backwards to provide heavies with corridors where their flanks are safe. And there aren’t all that many viable sniping positions either, so its all but inevitable that to deal with armor, frontal penetrations are necessary. And without frontal weakspots, the path of least resistance is gold spam. And that’s why were in this situation today.

Reducing damage of gold ammo needs to be followed with rebalancing HP of all those SUPER HTs, or bring back their weakspots, and even damage of SPGs as well. Because this is basically lengthening fighting time, which gives Clickers more chances to click.
Reducing dmg of gold ammo is not that bad but it must comes with another rebalancing changes, or WoT will die much sooner.

Keep in mind these are premium shells. Standard shells will keep their characteristics; it implies this in the same paragraph…. The point of this rebalance is to encourage strategic shell usage rather than spamming 1400 alpha HE shells at tier 8s.

So basically the people with heavily armoured tanks want to be invulnerable so WG just says yes we’ll make you harder to kill.
Ok so for the people with ordinary armour and guns can we please hav sone weak points in the well armoured tanks?

I don’t like this it just means we’ll need to use more “special” shells to kill an otherwise unpenatrable tank.

For those who dont understand these shity changes i must explain 1 scenario:
Imagen duel of russian/japanese heavy against french new heavy.Russian/jap have armor great pen and can bounce 3 of 4 enemy shells, while french have bad armour and disaster pen,cant bounce anything.Do u think it is going to be good expirience in that situation?All u doing with this change is to favorite russian tanks with great armour and pen,while all other tanks will suffer.

the only problem of wot is the RNG. WG decides at all your shots wether you hit or not. main weakspot of nearly all wot-tanks is their turret-traverse, but you cant hit any weakspot, if you dont pay. you can proove my “statement” at the stats of the players: nearly all players with hitratio over 65% have lots of premium-tanks in their garge. players with hitratio about 50% dont have much premium-tanks…if you wanna hit a weakspot, you must use gold-ammo!
wot is p2hit.

It is is just stupid. Nerfing Kv-5 – I don’t have it but why? It is also a premium, will the owners get at least hold value back? Type 5 nerf – who wants to play the crippled Japanese now? They will be near useless in tier X battles now. All these changes will break the game even more with people migrating to high pen tanks

So much comment, but I think (even if I’m sure WG will spoil it as always) better wait the result of the tests and what will be done in reality. Then I’m sure we’ll all have true reason to shout and cry.